RECONSIDERATIONS

Pitirim A. Sorokin: A Forerunner to Solzhenitsyn
Bryce J. Christensen

ASKED NAME A GREATRUSSIAN TO CRITIC of modern American culture, many Americans would identify Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Seldom have Americans heard avoice of moral authority comparable to that with which Solzhenitsyn spoke when he delivered his stunning Commencement Address at Harvard in 1978. Americans desperately needed to hear Solzhenitsyn’s bold denunciation of the “eroded humanism” which has fostered f “the dangerous trend o worshiping man and his material needs.” We needed to hear his warning about the evil consef quences o Americans’ “total emancipation ...from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves o mercy and sacrifice.” We needed to f hear his telling indictment of “the ruling and intellectual elites” who lack the courage t o oppose the “tilt of freedom toward evil.” We needed likewise to hear f his diagnosis o our “decline in the arts” and his condemnation of mass media f which fill the souls o listeners and viewers with “gossip, nonsense, vain t a l k and which adhere to intellectual fashion in a way that denies-as effectively as government censorship-public exposure t o many important ideas. But perhaps most of all we needed to hear his challenge to develop “a new level of life, where our physical nature will not be cursed, as in the Middle Ages, but even
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more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon, as in our Modern Era.”’ Progressive intellectuals found little to comfort them in Solzhenitsyn’s probf ing critique o the morally undernourished American culture they had helped create. Yet they could not easily dismiss the views of a man who had demonstrated rare personal courage in his witf ness against the horrors o Soviet tyranny and who had received the imprimatur of the Nobel jurors for his outstanding contributions to history and literature. Consequently, their strategy has generally been simply to ignore Solzhenitsyn as much as possible and to hope that the brevity of Americans’ collective memory will soon relieve them of the difficulty of responding t o his criticisms. Sadly, this strategy has succeeded remarkably well. When the media reported in May 1994 that Solzhenitsyn was returning from Vermont to his native Russia,2relatively few young adults recognized the moral stature ofthe man leaving America or even knew anything about his criticisms of our culture. f The same kind o national amnesia is also slowly obscuring the profound scholarship of another great Russian emigre writer who, like Solzhenitsyn, diagnosed f some o the most grievous of the spiritual and moral defects of our national
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culture. The profound scholarship we are thus losing is that of Pitirim A. Sorokin. Sorokin, in the view of Duke sociologist Edward A. Tiryakian, deserves recognition as a forerunner t o Solzhenitsyn, an earlier “prophet in the wilderness” with a message which “complements” Sol~henitsyn’s.~ our It is great misfortune that, like Solzhenitsyn, Sorokin is slipping from American memory. That Solzhenitsyn deserves recognition as a prophet few would dispute. But he is not the only modern writer to develop the gift of prophecy through the f crafting o serious fiction and history. Others-including William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow, Arthur Koestler, Albert Camus, Graham Greene, Robert Conquest, and Walker Percyhave likewise reached the prophetic strain by undertaking similar artistic and narrative tasks. But Sorokin was neither a novelist nor an historian. He was instead a sociologist, and prophetic is a word almost never applied to the work of sociologists. In truth, contemporary sociology appears designed t o smother and extinguish moral and spiritual insight. Because moral reasoning and spiritual vision do not fit neatly into the chi-square tests and other elaborate statistical formulae which fill sociological journals, many sociologists simply ignore t h e moral and spiritual significance of the problems they address. Lacking statistical tests for assessing the moral meaning of social developments (such as the rising incidence o divorce or declining f fertility of married women), these sociologists adopt a posture of value-neutral objectivity. Such objectivity inevitably f requires the repudiation o qualitative standards necessary for recognizing the person of rare spiritual or artistic gifts or t h e person of exceptional malignity. Conf sequently, sociologists level all o humanity into a faceless crowd possessing
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discrete political, economic, religious, and familial characteristics to be collected by survey and interview, then converted into a computerized “data set,” and finally dissected and parsed for publication. In the sociologist’s solvent of bland numbers, the genius o a Dante f and the evil of a Hitler, the sainthood of a Paul and the bestiality of a de Sade melt into anonymity. Should a modern Shakespeare ignore the questions about family history on the front of his survey form and turn it over t o write a blankverse play depicting the tragedy of a father betrayed by his daughters on the back, the sociologist would throw his survey away-after tabulating it with other “unusable responses.” As British sociologist Anthony Giddens concedes, f many o his colleagues believe that “if you can’t count it, it doesn’t c o ~ n t . ” ~ Though lethal in its effects on traditional morality, this sociological “quantophrenia” (Sorokin’s term) often serves the purposes of modern political activists quite well. For the impulse to turn statistical scholarship into political activism is as old as the discipline of sociology. “From its very inception,” Joshua Glenn admits, “Sociology has been an ‘impossible science’ torn between the ideals of scientific objectivity and humanistic reform-mindednes~.”~ In truth, this tension is often only apparent: sociology is frequently a fraudulent science in which statistical objectivity serves principally to mask or camouflage its practitioners’ political agenda. One recent British survey found that 77 percent of sociologists identify themselves politically as “on the left.”6A recent American survey found that 87 perf cent o sociologists consider themselves ‘‘liberals’’or “radicals,”while only 6 percent call themselves conservative^."^ In The Decomposition of Sociology Irving Louis Horowitz laments the “manifest politicization within sociology,”concluding that “the identification of social
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science with social advocacy has reached ...pandemic proportions.” “Advocacy,” he admits, “has become the very cause of social research. We have taken the chief weakness in the structure of knowledgeabout society (namely, the propensity to ideological thinking) and turned it into a first principle of the research process.” Among the many sociologists now waving the banners of feminism,Marxism,and Third Worldism, the “revolt against cultural tradition” is fast becoming “anew absolutism.”8Sociologyhas thus becomeadiscipline which deploys a scientific and mathematical methodology to push aside traditional moral reasoning and to advance a radical social agenda. So it is not any wonder that in his speech at Harvard in 1978 Solzhenitsyn identified the modern “concentration on social structures with an allegedly scientific approach” as one of the causes of our cultural malaise. What i a wonder, s however, is that Sorokin-surrounded by colleagues embarked on projects that were even in his day spiritually desiccatingand often politically perverse-somehow developed the mind and voice of a prophet, a legitimate forerunner of Solzhenitsyn! For Sorokin’s was a voice that articulated a sobering and astonishingly prescient message, which anticipated some of Solzhenitsyn’s criticisms of American culture and of the social sciences. In American culture, Sorokin repeatedly warned, as in the rest of Western culture, “sensate values,” deriving from an ethic which is “invariably utilitarian and hedonistic,” were fast displacing “ideational values.” The Western world, Sorokin lamented, was thus losing “the supersensory values of the kingdom of The consequent “ethical ‘atomism’ and nihilism,” Sorokin believed, f could only mean “the collapse o the whole edifice of sensate culture.”1o Identifying many of the cultural, political,
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and social symptoms of this collapse, Sorokin predicted worse to come. In art, Sorokin decried the emergence o an aesthetic “divorced from religions, f morals, and often even from science, philosophy, and other values,” an aesthetic which inspired works which were “sensational, passionate, pathetic, sensual, and incessantly new,” works produced by “professional artists catering to their patrons and to a passive public.”ll The ‘blackout’ of culture,” he declared, “isthe sign of our time.” Sorokin further decried the crass use to which contemporary advertisers put artpaintings by Michelangelo and Rembrandt used as images to sell jewelry, concertos by Bach and Beethoven turned into background music to promote perfume and cosmetics-created in more spiritually vibrant eras.”I2 The cultural decay evident in the arts, Sorokin reasoned, was manifesting itself in political developments making Americans “less and less free” as republican and contractual forms of government were “increasingly distorted by the intrusion of coercive o r fraudulent sim~lacra.”’~ He saw people being turned “more and more into puppets manipulated and controlled by the central Power Station of the Leviathan Go~ernment.”’~ Among the ruling elite Sorokin detected “moral behavior ...[which] tend[ed] to be more criminal and submoral than f that o the ruled strata.”15Meanwhile, the American press, which should have exposed and opposed such corrupt elites, repudiated its “moral and social responsibilities,” thus turning itself into a source of “irresponsible and unbridled propaganda” and a “means of discrediting and undermining precious values.”16 But Sorokin understood well that America’s social malaise was not restricted to its political elites. Writing at a time now caricatured as a period of suffocating domesticity, of Ozzie and Harriet,of Ward and June, Sorokin sensed
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the beginning of a socially disastrous decay in family life. He limned this decay in a “mounting curve of extramarital ref lations, divorce, and desertions, and o premarital sex relations.”I7He detected social illness in “the withering of parental love.”ls And he worried about the growing inclination of couples “to prevent conception’’ or “if, inadvertently a child is born, ...to get rid of it, sending it to some school or nursery.” Sorokin worried further that, with both parents working outside the home, “children are left largely to themselves, enjoying little parental control or guidance.”Ig Home was losing its vital functions, becoming “a mere incidental parking place for parents and children.”20 As with Solzhenitsyn, Sorokin made f his condemnation o modern culture the backdrop for a call for cultural renewal. “Nobody can revive the dying Sensate order,” he admitted. But he hoped that a people chastened “by tragedy, suffering, and crucifixion” in the collapse of sensate culture could return “back to reason and to eternal, lasting, universal, and absolutevalues,” by “thebest minds o Western society,” by “newSaint Pauls, f Saint Augustines and great religious and ethical leaders.”21The cultural phoenix f Sorokin looked for in the ashes o sensate culture was to be a hybrid creature, “a new Integral order” in which the techf nological advances o the sensate modern world united with the spiritual richness of Ideational traditions.22 American sociology during the decades in which Sorokin made his career-decades he shared with Carle Zimmerman, Talcott Parsons, and Robert Nisbet-was far less politicized than it is today. Moreover, many of Sorokin’s colleagues viewed his work on social mobility and on rural-urban sociology as conforming to, even defining, the stanf for dards o the profe~sion.~~Respecthis work even won Sorokin election as President of the American Sociological Asso386

ciation in 1964. Still, as a true maverick within the profession, he was the only person ever elected president on a writein ballot.24There is a delicious irony in the fact that in 1969, the year after his f death, a group o radical left-wing sociologists, knowing nothing about Sorokin except that he was a non-conformist and outsider, began sporting “Sorokin Lives!” lapel pins. When informed a b o u t Sorokin’s social and political views, they disposed o their pins with amazing raf pidit~!~~ Nonetheless, despite the respect he received from many within the discipline, Sorokin stood alone in his warnf ings about the disintegration o Western culture. No other sociologist sounded the alarm or anticipated Solzhenitsyn as he did. Many of his colleagues even ridiculed and mocked him for what they perceived as reactionary and alarmist viewsz6 The question thus remains: How did Sorokin resist the adverse pressures of his discipline so successfully that he could anticipate many of the prophetic moral pronouncements o Solzhenitsyn? f In the first place, Sorokin began his career in circumstances far removed from those of most budding American sociologists. Born on the 21st of January 1889 in an obscure Russian village and orphaned at age ten, Sorokin began his career at the University of St. Petersburg amidst the firestorm of the Russian Revolution. A s u p p o r t e r of Aleksandr Kerensky, Sorokin learned through direct personal experience many o the f same bitter lessons Solzhenitsyn was later to learn in the Gulag. He witnessed up-close the violence and treachery of the ideologues who built Lenin’s state f on a foundation o corpses. Himself subject to the cold, hunger, privation, and danger of early Bolshevik Russia, Sorokin f grieved the loss o many friends and colleagues who did not survive the strife which could easily have claimed his life.
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As an outspoken critic o the Bolsheviks, f a man personally denounced by Lenin and Zinovieff, Sorokin was in fact imprisoned and sentenced to be executed.27 Spared at the last minute by communist officials who thought they could win him over to their cause, he eventually ran f afoul o state censors for trying t o incorf porate chilling documentation o famine in Bolshevik Russia into a broader hisf torical analysis o the linkage between “compulsory statism”and “massive starvation.” The censors seized his manuscript (eventually translated and published in the United States under the title Hunger as a Factor in Human Affairs2? and reported Sorokin to their superiors. So it was that, just as their successors would later do with Solzhenitsyn, communist authorities decided in 1922 that the easiest way to handle a troublesome scholar was to exile him. In September of that year, Sorokin was banished from Russia, never to return, and in November 1923 he began his career as a sociologist in the United States. After six productive f years at the University o Minnesota, he was invited to organize and serve as the f first chairman o a sociology department at Harvard. Sorokin brought to his highly visible position at Harvard a profound understanding of the evils lurking in many of the-isms (communism, collectivism, statf ism, socialism) o modernity. Without this understanding, many of Sorokin’s colleagues-including Professor J.L. Gillin, who served as president of the American Sociological Society-succumbed t o the deceptions of communist propaganda, seeing in the achievements of the Soviet system a marvelous “triumph over the past.”2gSorokin, however, stood apart from his colleagues not only in his skepticism toward the Soviet Union’s identity as a progressive regime but also in his even more prof found skepticism toward the concept o
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progress itself. For unlike most of his colleagues, Sorokin did not subscribe to the dominant Whig version of history, with its emphasis on those “principles of progress” which yield what Herbert Butterfield identified as “a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the p r e ~ e n t . ” ~ ~ Sorokin realized that while the Whig f version o history may serve as a plausible guide to the history of technology and the natural sciences, it cannot be trusted as an interpretation of broader developments in culture. To explain the movement from past to present, an honest mind often needs darkconcepts such as decay, apostasy, and corruptionnot just the cheery concept of progress. Colleagues who claimed that “nothing important ha[d] been discovered in their fields during all the preceding centuries” and who referred to pre-twentieth centuries only with a condescending “sense of their own superiority over the unscientific old fogies” greatly irritated S ~ r o k i n , whose own work was rich ~’ with material drawn from ancient Egyp tian, Roman, Greek, Chinese, Hindu, Hebrew, and Christian sources,32material cited not merely to show the superif ority o moderns over premoderns, but often to recover important concepts lost to modern consciousness. Unlike colleagues who cited only contemporary colleagues in their own discipline, Sorokin populated his pages with such grand figures as Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Jeremiah, Apostles John and Paul, Dante, Pascal, Augustine, and A q ~ i n a s . ~ ~ Decades before Solzhenitsyn bemoaned modern man’s “emancipation ...from the moral heritage o Christian f centuries,” Sorokin had already recognized the peril of modern intellectual To and cultural “amnesia.”34 contemporaries convinced theywere moving away f from the evils o the past toward a glorious future, Sorokin delivered a warning
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that the highly urbanized society of behavioralistic, etc.” “These interpretamodernity was slipping toward grave tions,” he wrote, “have deprived man “dangers for [its] long and successful and his culture and values of everything existence”: namely, “disorganization of divine, spiritual, supermaterialistic, or the family.. .progress of irreligiosity.. . human. They equate man and his culture increase of criminality ... increase of poand values with atoms, electron-protons, litical instability, disorders, and class reflex mechanisms, reflexorganisms, the strife...increase of ‘mechanization’ of libido, and so on.’’%Sorokin, who repeathuman thought and thinking edly quoted the Bible in his writings,39 f processes ...a ‘de-spiritualization’ o hufeared the barrenness of a philosophy man beings and human personalities; lacking any spiritual understanding of man’s origin and destiny. A society long and an increase in the ‘mechanization’of governed by such a philosophy must the arts.”35 perish. By refusing to join in the worship of Sorokin’s refusal to “adhere to the progress fostered by Whig history, canon of objectivity,” Arthur K. Davis Sorokin thus protected himself against reports, caused many o his colleagues f two different but related forms of moral to “look askance” at his But the f blindness: the sterility o objective scidisapproval of objectivists bothered ence and the relativism of progressive f Sorokin no more than the complaints o politics. Because Whig history has often progressives, who regarded him as a granted pride of place to science and reactionary. For he understood that the f technology as the engines o progress f perdition o a spiritually starved people and the chief means of ameliorating huis only hastened by progressive thinkers man life, it has conferred a dubious preswho in place o “eternal lasting, univerf tige upon the spiritually barren language sal, and absolute values” offer the “new and formulae of the sciences. When a p morality” of a politically expedient relaplied to social questions, this sterile lantivism. Against increasingly fluid conguage implies a rejection o the moral and f ceptions of sexual morality, marriage, spiritual responses to these questions of and family life, Sorokin waged a coura“prescientific” thinkers and writers. geous but often lonely war for the eterBut Sorokin saw little to admire in the nal truths undergirding conjugal fidelity “sham-scientific slang” and “obtuse jarand familial integrity. In 1956 Sorokin gon” of colleagues whose writings were f “devoid o elegance, as well as clarity.”36 thundered against the “sexual anarchy” which was turning “the traditional ‘child He recognized the real accomplishments of God’ created in God’s image ...into a of mathematicians and statisticians, yet sexual apparatus powered by sex inhe concluded that “in spite of the enorstinct, preoccupied with sex matter^."^^ f mous amounts o energy, labor, and funds But his denunciation of sexual license invested in advanced statistical research was “ridiculed or ignored by social sci[in the social sciences]...its contribuAnd tions have been so far fairly m ~ d e s t . ” ~ ’ e n t i s t ~ . ” ~ ~ more than thirty years f later when some o Sorokin’s most disMore fundamentally, Sorokin sensed the tinguished professional successors respiritual sterility of which the jargon considered his warnings, they conf and formulae o the social sciences were fessed themselves “unable to demonsymptomatic. He decried the “proliferastrate scientifically the effects of pretion of various ‘debunking’ interpretamarital sex on people’s mental health, tions of man, culture, and values: mechamoral integrity, personal happiness, and nistic, reflexological, biological, materia l t r u i ~ m .This is astounding blindness ”~~ alistic, organismic, endocrinological,
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given the contemporary epidemics o f AIDS and other venereal diseases, the shocking rise in illegitimacy, and the skyrocketing levels of child poverty, juvenile delinquency, academic failure, and adolescent suicide-all linked t o family dissol~tion.4~ “Sorokin!thou shouldst be living at this hour,” indeed. Contemporary sociologists, who talk glibly of “alternative”conceptions o the f f a m i l ~ , ~ ~even attack colleagues who and dare to suggest that recent trends in family life constitute reason “for look like moral and intellectual midgets compared t o Sorokin, who in 1948 already understood that for society to be renewed, “marriage and the family must be restored to their place of dignity among the greatest values in human life, not t o be trifled with. As a socially sanctioned union of husband and wife, of parents and children, the family is to be radically differentiated from all ”~~ unsanctioned sex a s s ~ c i a t i o n . Contemporary sociologists may wax enthusiastic about therapeutic, educational, economic, or political surrogates for the family,48but Sorokin realized that the family is unmatched in “inculcating deep sympathy, compassion, and loyalty,”and that the search for satisfactory surrogates is folly. “No other agency,” h e wrote, ”can perform this function as well as the average good family.”49 Our morally and socially befuddled age could benefit tremendously from a rediscovery of the wisdom of Pitirim Sorokin, Solzhenitsyn’s improbable predecessor. Nonetheless, those who would reclaim his work should recognize that, although prescient and valuable in many respects, it does betray certain weaknesses. First, despite the relish with which Sorokin lampooned colleagues for their abominable writing style, it cannot be said that Sorokin himself completely escaped contagion. Anyone who can write of the need for an “adequate analysis o the componential structure”of one f
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theory5O or o “a limited extensity of inf teraction” within another5’ is someone who has-alas!-learned to write like a sociologist. Indeed, Sorokin’s most felicitous writing may perhaps be found in his Leaves horn a Russian Diary, an early autobiographical work written not for his professional colleagues but for general readers. And although Sorokin’s concern for and responsiveness to literature and the arts is refreshing in a sociologist, it must be conceded that his literary and aesthetic analysis (especially f his statistical tabulations o “Ideational,” “Materialistic,” and “Mixed” works) is crude and unsati~fying.~~ Aside from his lapses in style and in aesthetic subtlety, however, Sorokin appears deficient in more fundamental ways, particularly in his attitudes toward religion and cultural renewal. Few sociologists have ever taken religion more seriously or have acknowledged more fully the cultural centrality of relif gion than Sorokin. Still,some o Sorokin’s pronouncements leave the reader with the uncomfortable feeling that heviewed “cult and ritual ...theology and dogmas” not as matters of truth or falsehood but as matters of social health or illness.53 No doubt true religion does foster social health, but those who cherish it chiefly for that reason make a great mistake. Reason t o suppose that Sorokin made that mistake may be found in the suspiciously eclectic way in which he spoke o f “God, Brahman, Tao, etc. as an Infinite Manifold”54 in the ease with which he and could slide the name of Jesus between f the names o the merely mortal Aristotle f and Mohammed in a list o “great moral innovators and altruist^."^^ Lamentably, we must even acknowledge that at times Sorokin apparently regarded religion as no more than a set o socially necessary moral dicta decked f with inspiring theological phrases which wise men can “create or recreate” at will.56 Despite his stout resistance to
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moral relativism, it appears that Sorokin succumbed to theological relativism. Thus, although we may confer the title prophet on Sorokin in recognition of the prescience and the soundness of many of his social and cultural pronouncements, we must not suppose that he deserves that title in the full and weighty sense that it carries when applied t o an Isaiah, a Jeremiah, an Ezekiel, and other men who have in truth spoken for the f God o Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Perhaps the inadequacy of his religious thinking explains why Sorokinanxious to see cultural life and renewal f beyond the horrifying demise o sensate culture-was willing to recognize some rather poorly qualified intellectuals as f the bearers o such life and renewal. In some of his later writings, the sobriety with which he acknowledged that only ‘hew Saint Pauls, Saint Augustines and great religious and ethical leaders” could effect genuine cultural renewal gave way to a perilous willingness to entrust “distinguished bodies of scientists” and “distinguished religious, philosophical, artistic, and literary organizations” with

the task o appointing “Scientists, Saints, f and Sages” who could spiritually inspire and (through a “World Federal Government”) politically reshape the As we contemplate the ideological corf f ruption o many o our scientific, artistic, literary, philosophical, and even religious organizations, we recognize how dangerous Sorokin’s proposal is. But we may also see how hard it is,without faith f in the transcendent God o eternity, to resist the temptation to reach out for a hopelessly premature earthly solution to our moral and social problems. f It must finally be said o Sorokin that his diagnosis o our cultural malaise is f far more reliable than his prescription for its cure. But Americans still very much need to hear that diagnosis. Despite his inadequacies, Sorokin offers much to our benighted era, both as a brave fighter for truth in his own right and as a noble forerunner of an even greater fighter for truth, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Wider recognition of the contributions of both Russian sages would d o much t o restore sanity, honesty, and hope to our intellectual life.